


Rilla and Oldie

by RottenFruitz



Category: Monster Hunter (Video Games)
Genre: Main Character is A Thief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26851759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RottenFruitz/pseuds/RottenFruitz
Summary: One of the few successful thieves in the Monster Hunter world, Rilla, comes across the a curious brute tigrex that may just help her with her thieving career.
Kudos: 5





	Rilla and Oldie

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally made for a contest! I planned to post it here, too, but never got around to it. Whoops! I also haven't edited it since I posted it in the MH Amino contest, so there are some small errors here and there.

The terrified bellows of two aptonoth barely broke through the sound of rain and wind. Lighting streaked across the sky every other second, providing just enough light for the large herbivores to see as they ran down the road. In their minds, they had just been attacked by a predator while they were pulling their cart and they had narrowly escaped with their lives. In reality, a lone thief had snuck up to them, cut their harnesses and slashed at their hindquarters to scare them off. As the aptonoth clumsily stumbled into the cover of the trees, the merchant they left behind could only stare in dismay. The unlucky wyverian had, understandably, thought he could pass down this quaint road with no issues. Thieves weren’t common, at least, not roadside ones. It was too risky. Merchants almost always had escorts or other merchants with them for protection. And even if you outnumbered or outsmarted a caravan, you had to survive the monsters and the wilderness ( _ and _ get to a town or city before it was alerted about the stolen goods) to even think about enjoying your riches.

Unfortunately, this thief was very good at what he did. He hadn’t been planning to rob anyone (yet), but he’d seen the merchant struggling down the road and just couldn’t help himself. Using the storm to hide his presence, he’d snuck up on the merchant, clambered onto his cart, and pounced onto him from above. Before the wyverian could even think to scream for help, the thief had his mouth covered and his aptonoth fleeing into the forest.

The wyverian squinted and tried to make out the face of his attacker using the brief flashes of lightning, but it was no use. All he could clearly see was a remobra-hide boot pressing him into the mud. A knife was held to his throat, dangerously close to his artery. Crying for help now would likely be a death sentence.

“P-Please sir! Don’t hurt me! I have family to feed!” the wyverian pleaded over the rain and howling wind, “Take what you want! I’ll even sh-show you my nicest stock!”

The thief leaned in close. “Good, good. I didn’t wanna hurt ya,” he muttered, “Just show me the goods an’ I’ll send you on your way, yeah?”

The wyverian nodded hurriedly and led the thief to his most valuable goods. He would miss that zenny dearly, but not as much as he would his life. Once he got what he wanted, the thief stayed true to his word and turned the wyverian loose. Then, he hurried back to the town he had come from so he could pawn off the goods before anyone knew they were stolen. With luck, he’d be long gone before the town could do anything about it.

The wyverian ran as fast as his legs could carry him, trying to put together a description of the man that had just robbed him. But this would be his folly, the man would never be caught. Unbeknownst to him and the thief’s other victims, he wasn’t a man at all.

He was actually a young woman named Rilla.

You see, Rilla had been born with some unorthodox genes. She had a thick beard that would be considered very handsome on a man, and her natural voice was unusually deep. It could certainly make day-to-day life annoying, but it had its advantages. For one thing, she had figured out that if she disguised herself as a man when she stole (and while she pawned her stolen goods), she could live a normal-ish life as her regular, womanly self with no fear of being caught. She had always had a knack for swindling people, but this form of thievery had proved particularly lucrative ever since she’d started to do it a year ago.

Rilla pulled the cloak off her head and obscured her face scars with a few splotches of mud as she arrived at the town’s gates. The guards let her in with a smile and a friendly “Enjoy yourself, sir!” along with some well-wishes. Once inside, she stopped by where the merchants gathered and spent some time perusing each of their storefronts until she found the ones who would pay her the most Once her pockets were lined with zenny, she got ready to leave for the next town. Going on foot during a storm probably wasn’t the smartest idea, but she didn’t want to pay for a room at an inn; a lawman could get the jump on her while she slept.

Rilla stopped near the second town on the road to change. It was an ordeal and a half, but she would rather get it over with now than be jailed later. One miserably wet shave and a change of clothes later, and she was herself again—hairless face, scars, wild hair, and all.

The next morning, the news of the thief had spread across the entire area. Five towns down the road were on high alert over the “Roadside Thief”. Rilla was pleased when she overheard the chatter from travellers and hunters. The authorities had described her as male with a thick beard, and the descriptions didn’t include any of her scars. The picture on the wanted posters looked fairly different from her actual self, too. Great! She would be set until the money ran dry. That would take at least a couple weeks, if she rationed her savings properly.

Rilla was only interested in staying in this town for a little bit. She stuck around to eat, get some better gear, and restock on supplies, then left at noon. Her goal was to get over the mountains in the distance; she knew of a seaside city beyond them that would make a great vacation spot. She also planned to rob a few of the wealthy folk in the mountain city as she made her way there so she could enjoy herself once she arrived. She knew the city (and all these towns, for that matter) had a name, but she never bothered to remember it. She only saw it as a possible obstacle and a source of cash.

Despite the road ahead of her being long and made up of viscous mud and puddles of filthy water, Rilla was in high spirits. Ever since she’d decided to get more…  _ aggressive _ with her thieving exploits, she’d been sitting pretty on a nice pile of zenny. If she was optimistic about her earnings, it was probably as lucrative as being a hunter, but without the imminent threat of death-by-mauling every time she went to work!  _ (Although that was certainly a threat regardless.) _

The thief was startled out of her jovial thoughts by the sound of something roaring in the distance. At first she thought it was a tigrex, but normal tigrex didn’t shake the earth and the trees with their voice alone. This was something more powerful.

That was strange. Most tigrex that powerful tended to hang out in harsher climates, didn’t they? The roar shook the forest again, and Rilla quickly narrowed down the possibilities to two beasts, the brute tigrex or the grimclaw tigrex. Neither was good news for her. She ducked into the forest for cover and listened intently for the large monster’s footsteps. A different monster’s roar responded to the tigrex; a rathalos. Poor wyvern stood no chance against a tigrex, even with flight on its side, but maybe Rilla could sneak past while the two were distracted with each other.

Wasting no time, Rilla darted further into the woods, keeping the road in sight as she sprinted through. Her footsteps made virtually no noise as she moved. Up ahead, she could see the large, dark body of a tigrex shaking trees as it threw itself into the road. Mud flew into the sky as its weight made deep divots in the ground. A silver-scaled creature darted out of the reach of the tigrex’s claws; it gleamed despite the overcast sky. Oh. A  _ silver _ rathalos.  _ Lovely. _

Keeping her eyes on the monsters, Rilla began to make her way around them. The two wyverns were too occupied with each other to even notice her going around them.

That is, until they weren’t.

The rathalos got cocky. It probably overestimated the advantage flying gave it. The monster had tried to take out the tigrex’s eyes with a well-placed talon swipe; it was instead grabbed by the feet and swung around like a dog toy. The flying wyvern shrieked and haphazardly spat fire at its attacker’s eyes until it was let go. The silver rathalos fled and, oddly enough, the brute tigrex didn’t try to chase it. After a moment or two of watching its opponent leave, the brute seemed to completely forget its fight. It yawned and started to roll around in the road, coating itself in the cool mud. Rilla was so amused by the sight of a terrifying predator acting like a playful kitten that she momentarily forgot to watch her feet. Unfortunately, a moment was all she needed to give herself away.

A large twig snapped underneath her feet. The noise it made felt deafeningly loud.

The brute paused in its merrymaking and looked up to see what made the noise. Human and monster locked eyes. Rilla was frozen in place, and not just from the thick mud that had grabbed hold of her boots. The tigrex looked to be decently old, perhaps slightly elderly. Maybe she could outrun it? Somehow? She had a flash bomb in her travel bag, she might be able to reach for it before the monster got to her. Or… what if she paralyzed it instead? How long would that incapacitate it? The longer Rilla’s mind raced the more she realized her fear probably wasn’t warranted. The tigrex had no intention of moving, its body language was relaxed and its breathing was slow and controlled. Hell, Rilla had enough time to decide this monster was a female, and that it had the strangest, most human eyes she’d ever seen on a non-elder dragon. They weren’t intelligent or anything. In fact, they were the opposite. They were really dopey, actually. It was like looking into the eyes of a kid or a kitten.

After thirty seconds or so of staring, Rilla finally pried her boots from the muck and cautiously started to walk away. The brute tigrex made no attempt to follow and went back to rolling in the mud.

When Rilla stopped at the third town, she rented a room at the cheapest inn she could find. Usually she just found a nice roof to sleep on or something, but she was still worried about the silver rathalos she’d seen earlier. As she got ready to sleep, she started thinking about the brute tigrex again. The dopey-eyed monster reminded her of an experience she’d had in her youth. She had come across a kirin while she was foraging on a mountainside. They’d kept a respectable distance from each other, but whenever they did make eye contact, it sent shivers up Rilla’s spine. It wasn’t even an ape or primate, but its stare was so human she wouldn’t have been surprised if the thing could speak. Maybe the kirin had looked at her and gone,  _ ‘Wow, that human has such monster-like eyes.’ _ The brute had given her the same feeling, minus the fierce intelligence. Had it looked at her the same way the kirn did and thought something like,  _ ‘Wow! That human has such smart eyes!’ _ ?

In the morning, hunters young and old poured into the town in search of the brute tigrex and the silver rathalos that it had fought with. Brute tigrex liked it where it was harsher in climate so it was unusual for one to be wandering around the forest like this. Maybe Rilla was just a pessimist, but they probably just wanted to be the ones famous for killing the weirdo brute tigrex that  _ almost destroyed this poor town  _ or something. Still, she stuck around to see what kind of hunters and handlers were showing up. The loners who hung out on their own were easy enough to swipe from; hunters were loaded with zenny anyway, they wouldn’t miss it.

After a while of stealing, selling useless stuff, and buying some more useful stuff, she stopped by an inn to go rearrange her travel bag. Rilla usually would’ve left the town by now, but she just couldn’t help herself. This place had some really sweet food, and she saw a cool knife in a store window earlier… 

One hour, several pastries, and a shiny new dagger later, and Rilla had decided she was done hanging around. There was only so much fun to have when the place you were visiting was also trying to defend from a possible monster attack. A lot of restaurants had to cut their meatiest dishes from the menu out of fear that the monsters might smell the food being prepared or served. Not only that, but nobody was allowed to leave until the threat of the monsters was eliminated. Eh. Fair enough. Even with hunters on standby, a silver rathalos or brute tigrex could do some serious damage. Rilla had seen a few towns razed by monsters and elder dragons in her day, including her own; they were truly a sorry sight.

A tedious day passed and the brute tigrex seemed to have moved on. All of its tracks were old and, according to the palicoes of several hunters, they smelled old, too. The best the town could do was warn the nearby towns of its presence. The silver rathalos was still very close by, though, so the stay-in-place order remained.

Rilla was annoyed by this, but she would be more annoyed if she was eaten by a wyvern. She stayed put. Another day of petty thievery and gorging herself on meat pie went by; the sky remained overcast and it rained lightly.

Rilla was sitting on a bench and pondering how safe it would be to sneak out of the town at nightfall when the silver rathalos appeared. Cries of alarm filled the air, followed by the screeches of a very angry rathalos. A storm of arrows were launched up at the sky, but only a few of them even grazed the monster’s belly. It opened its jaws and shot out a blast of white-hot fire at its attackers before swooping towards the nearest source of meat it could find. The thing must’ve been damn hungry to pull a stunt like this. Rilla could almost empathize.

A wooden building (a restaurant, most likely) was simultaneously burned and smashed to pieces as the rathalos dove for it. It circled back around, swooped down again, and came back up with two talon-fuls of meat and rubble. After Rilla saw that, she decided she would leave. That brute tigrex was going to attack anytime soon; there was no point in staying. Plus, the smell of burning wood and despair would  _ really _ bring down her mood. The thief escaped easily with the carnage as her cover. Once she was out of town and away from the sounds of battle, she allowed herself to relax.

The trail was quiet (once you ignored the squelching mud, anyway) and peaceful with plenty of scenery to admire. The occasional monsters that showed up were all pushovers or uninterested in fighting. The worst trouble she had was with a lone, wounded velociprey that tried to nip at her a few times before she gave it a good jab in the beak.

Halfway to the next town, Rilla noticed large, deep pawprints leading out from the forest and onto the path. They belonged to a tigrex. A brute tigrex. Curious, she followed the trail until she saw the familiar brute in the distance. The thief double checked that the monster’s eyes were still goofy looking. Yep. It was the same monster from before.

The stupid wyvern had plonked herself down in the middle of the road so she could enjoy her meal of freshly caught rhenoplos. She had a wound on top of her head so gnarly it was a wonder she had survived when she initially received it. She also ate sloppily due to her missing a decent amount of teeth. There weren’t enough missing to impair her, but it was still noticeable from afar. Maybe they had fallen out from old age?

Rilla sucked in a breath. If this tigrex was still as weirdly calm as it had been earlier she could just  _ walk _ around it, right? There was only one way to find out. She carefully began to walk in a wide circle around the brute, employing the same techniques that allowed her to avoid detection from human ears. By the time Rilla was on the other side of the monster, she had finished her meal and was staring at her with that doofy, too-human stare again. She was somewhat enraptured by her gaze now.

The thief nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard a scream of terror, followed by the sound of four-toed hooves hurriedly sloshing through mud. When she looked back, she saw the tail-end of a merchant’s wagon speeding into the horizon. It was a merchant’s cart; the driver must have seen the tigrex from a distance and fled.

Fortunately for Rilla, this wasn’t a regular merchant’s cart, this was a  _ poorly secured _ merchant’s cart. The thief was delighted to watch as a handful of the merchant’s goods rolled off his cart and into the mud. Among them was a bag of gems. The rest were just your everyday useful things, a couple cool drinks and two bundles of herbs.

She was probably way too confident considering there was still a tigrex sitting behind her, but she didn’t care. She happily ran over to the fallen goods and stuffed them into her bag, save for the gems—she wanted to count those first. The tigrex tilted her head as she kneeled in the mud and started adding up the zenny the jewels were worth. “You might be the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Old Girl…?” Rilla said as she stuffed the jewels back into their bag. She looked up at the brute and tried to gauge her age again. “I, uh, I assume that name is accurate. I mean, you probably aren’t that old, but…” The thief trailed off when she realized she didn’t need to justify the nickname to a creature that didn’t know a lick of spoken language.

Old Girl slow-blinked at her like a friendly lynian, then stood up and disappeared into the forest.

Rilla, her mind racing, turned and ran down the road.

When she got to the fourth town, she was dismayed to realize that the merchant had noticed the loss of his gems. He was going around asking hunters if they would look for them on the road. He seemed pretty desperate to find them, too. Rilla had avoided him and made it to a tavern before she could be questioned. Unfortunately her guilty conscience had decided to kick in as soon as she sat down. She fought with herself for a while before begrudgingly finding the merchant and telling him she’d found something on the road. Afterwards, she took the satchel from her bag and gave him…

Half his jewels back.

He was disappointed, but grateful anyway.

(What? I hope you weren’t expecting something more generous…)

With her leftover loot, Rilla bought herself some better clothes, then got a basket of meat pastries from a local bakery. After that, she found a roof to hide on and watched the townsfolk from above. The town’s chief, like the last, had decided to lock everyone inside to keep them safe from the brute wandering around; a smart choice, but one that was seriously getting in the way of Rilla’s plans. Hunters and volunteers had been ordered to walk around making sure everyone followed orders. It wouldn’t be the first time she had to evade a couple pesky guards, though. Rilla easily found an opening in the hunters’ patrols—if you could even call them that—and slipped out of the town with no trouble. The forest combined with darkness provided excellent cover. Even when a troupe of palicoes carrying wounded hunters ran past, she remained undetected.

Further down the road, Rilla encountered tigrex footprints again. They were wild and frantic and accompanied by spatters of dark blood.  _ ‘Hunters,’ _ Rilla thought nervously. She normally wasn’t too choked up about monsters being hunted, but Old Girl was different, you know? She had to see what had become of her. She may not have been a hunter or some boring, pointy-eared researcher, but she still knew more than most about tracking monsters. The thief tracked Old Girl as best she could through the forest, keeping a watchful eye out for any unexpected monsters that might try and make a meal out of her.

The sound of rustling leaves and grass caused Rilla to freeze in place. Something big was close by. Whatever, she could deal with it. She had been hunted by every animal under the sun: humans, monsters, a ravenous nerscylla, a pack of ioprey. This was nothing.

Two familiarly dopey yellow eyes stared at her from the shadows. 

“Oh my  _ god _ .” Rilla didn’t know if she should laugh or get annoyed. The brute tigrex’s snout carefully pushed through the forest foliage. She was nursing a brand new set of wounds, but she was alive.

Now certain she wasn’t in immediate danger of being eaten, Rilla relaxed. Feeling empathetic for the poor brute, she dug around in her bag for her leftover meat pies and offered them to her. “How do you feel about meat pies, Oldie?”

Old Girl sniffed the pastries cautiously. A second later, she had all three pies, plus the surrounding dirt and grass, in her mouth. Rilla hoped that wouldn’t hurt her old-lady stomach. When Oldie had finished eating, she leaned in close, touched her nose to Rilla’s face, and sighed. Sour-smelling air blew Rilla’s hair off of her face. The human returned the favor with a small pat on the snout. She noticed a tick near the wyvern’s nostril, pulled it off, then had a brilliant idea. This poor, wounded thing wasn’t living up to her full potential, dragged down by parasites and hunters and… being kind of stupid. But maybe, with some training, she could fix that.

“You did me a real solid back there, Oldie,” Rilla said. She started picking ugly, blood-filled ticks off of the monster. They had found space to jam their mouths between her scales. Oldie winced, but seemed to recognize what the human was doing, and let her continue her work. “You know, I think you and I could help each other,” Rilla started to whisper out of fear that someone might hear her, “There could be way more pastries where that came from, you know. We could work together. You don’t even have to worry your old bones about fighting at all!”

The thief moved up to Oldie’s shoulder blades, plucking off and killing more pests as she went. Oldie rested her head on her paws, but still kept an eye on Rilla as she climbed up. She couldn’t understand a word the human was saying, but she would hopefully understand the intent behind them.

“See, we could have something real good going!” Rilla said. She climbed onto Oldie’s head and started working on the ticks up there. “You could be my right-hand woman. It’ll be a cakewalk. We’ll just wait for a merchant to pass us by and snatch their stuff when they run away crying. It’ll be meat pie city for the rest of time!”

Oldie grunted. Rilla took that as a sign of suspicion.

“Hey, I am a  _ thief _ . I’ve been hunted, too, you know?” she muttered, dramatically twirling her knife, “I know everything there is to know about hiding from humans. Besides, it's not like I’m gonna send you out there  _ now _ . That’d just be stupid. But you are right. It could be too risky. How about this? Rilla and Oldie: Highway Thieves! We’ll snatch up people’s zenny so fast they wouldn’t even know what hit them! And then, we’ll get ourselves some meat pastries and kick back in our hideout—Oh! A  _ hideout _ ! We need a hideout, too…”

Rilla spent a chunk of the night brainstorming ways she could use Oldie to further her thieving career. When Oldie got bored and got up to wander, Rilla quickly stepped in to steer her in the right direction (that is, away from other people). All she needed was some jerky and Oldie might as well have been on a leash. Now the pair were headed through the forest; it was a shortcut to the mountain city that a lone human would have been too vulnerable to use. They made it pretty far before Oldie got tired and refused to move. Rilla was happy to set up a small fire and roll out her sleeping mat next to her.

During the night, the thief kept dreaming up all the devilish and conniving plans she could think of. Old Girl probably dreamed of rhenoplos and aptonoth and dirt-meat pies.

The next day, Rilla and Oldie traveled deeper into the forest together. Once the wyvern had realized Rilla knew how to cook, she was perfectly content to follow the human everywhere. The tigrex could keep up a jog or sprint for an hour at a time, so their pace was stilted, but quick. Deeper into the woods, there were nargacuga, najarala, and other forest-dwellers everywhere. Well, not  _ everywhere _ , but there were certainly more than Rilla had ever seen in a day. It was probably the lack of towns and cities (and most importantly, hunters) that made them concentrate here.

Most of the monsters the duo encountered saw Old Girl and wisely backed off, allowing them to pass by without a fuss. A few were too brave for their own good, though. When those monsters appeared, Rilla had to step in and help. Oldie wasn’t very good at picking up on aggression from people or monsters, unfortunately. A day and a sunset later, the monsters had thinned out again and they were coming up on the mountain range. The regular path would have taken at least three or four days. And it probably would have been unpleasantly muddy.

The mountain city lay at the base of the largest mountain in the range; it had to be positively loaded with goodies to pillage. It was also much bigger than she had imagined. It was ambitious and overwhelming to even  _ think _ about robbing the place, but Rilla knew she could do it if she took her time and planned things out. It was actually pretty good that she’d arrived earlier than intended. Now she had all the time in the world to plot and plan while her beard grew in!

But first, she had to put Oldie to the test. She was a tigrex, sure, but she also had a head injury and tended to be a little oafish. She might be better suited for standing around and looking scary than actual heists. Using more steak and freshly killed rhenoplos as a bribe, Rilla led Old Girl around the city and into the mountains so they could begin their training.

First, she stole herself a saddle to rest on Oldie’s neck, then made a bit by raiding a building site for some rebar. The rope she used to finish the bit was also stolen from a build site (she figured it would be sturdier than the stuff she kept on hand). It had taken a week and some serious patience on Rilla’s part, but Oldie eventually got the hang of being led around with her saddle and bit. Then she had to be taught basic tricks. Another week went by teaching Oldie things like sit, stay, lie down, and everything else she would need to know. Rilla felt like a housewife and a ninja; she was constantly hunting for the snacks Oldie needed to be motivated to train, then studying the nearby city for weaknesses and easily targeted houses in her spare time. After a month or two of work, though, Oldie was content to do everything she was asked with no food in sight. The warm and fuzzy feeling of having a bond with Oldie was a rare one for Rilla. The last time she’d felt it was when she’d befriended the pair vultures that had nested near her house.  _ ‘Man, where did the time go?’ _ Rilla thought,  _ ‘I always thought I’d be a vet or doctor or something… and now I’m about to rob a bunch of cityfolk blind.’ _

Seeing how far she’d come almost made her chuckle, until she remembered how sad it all was.

The night the heist was supposed to take place, Oldie was fully trained up and Rilla had regrown her beard. She had binded her chest down so it looked as flat as possible and put on the darkly-colored, tightly-fitted clothing. She carried two small bags and a map she had sketched out of the entire city—including all of the best places to try and rob. As a contingency plan, Old Girl had been given a strong dose of armorskin to keep any pesky hunters at bay, and her scales had been further darkened with some paint to help her blend into the shadows.

At midnight, Rilla descended into the city while Old Girl stationed herself nearby.

As soon as she was over the walls, the thief made a beeline for the most valuable houses she could find on the street. She had each of them marked out in advance during her previous trips there. There was no telling when someone might spot her and call the authorities, so she had to travel light. If she was careful, even a tiny haul could make her rich for a little while. Rilla only took a few things from each home; mostly necklaces, gems and shinies, a bit of food, and the occasional useful thing whenever she came across it. Pretty soon, she had two sacks full of loot from buildings all over the city. Annoyingly, her stolen goods gingled and tinkled with every step; it was time to leave. If she was lucky, nobody had seen her yet.

“Hey! Hey you!”

Speak of the devil and he really will appear, huh. She peeked over the edge to make sure she really was being chased.

“Oi! Thief!” a guard yelled at him, angrily waving his fist.

Yep. She’d been found out. Someone must’ve seen her through their window or something.

Quick as a kirin, Rilla bolted (heh) over the rooftops. The houses were close enough together that she could jump between them with no fear of misjudging the distance. She could hardly hear the sound of the guards shouting and chasing after her over her own heartbeat. With a thud, she jumped onto the wall, bruising herself in the process. She shakily stood up and whistled as loud as she could. A moment later, Old Girl responded with a low, rumbly whooping noise. Before the guards could catch her, she was down the wall. Oldie met her halfway and skidded to a stop so her partner could hop onto her saddle. As the guards rushed to city gates, Oldie and Rilla were rocketing off like a pair of bounce bombs flying towards an unfortunate monster. All the lawmen saw when they came outside was the vague shape of something large and scaly disappearing into the night.

In the morning, as the sun rose, the only evidence of the thief (aside from the guards and an eyewitness’s account) were tigrex pawprints leading towards the mountains, and the horde of people swindled in the night.

Once Rilla was in the mountains, she was quick to take off her disguise. She shaved her beard, restyled her hair, unbinded her chest, then changed out of and hid her old clothes at the bottom of her travel bag underneath all her stolen goods. Normally she would wait until it was safer, but there was no time. Word had gotten around about the tigrex lurking nearby. She could see hunters gearing up in the distance already.

Aside from the nearby danger, Rilla was proud of herself.

This haul was  _ really _ good, especially for it being her first go at this type of thing. But the plan wasn’t finished yet. There were snacks for Oldie and zenny for her, but to truly enjoy it they had to get to the coast. It was a little overwhelming; her head was still spinning from almost being caught and her stomach felt like it was going to turn inside out.

Rilla sighed, took a few seconds to pull herself together, then hopped onto Old Girl’s back. Her anxiety had been partly replaced with childish excitement. As she steered Oldie down the mountain, she started thinking of all the schemes she could pull off with a hulking, if not slightly dopey, brute tigrex by her side. She would be filthy rich, and Oldie would get all the meat pies she could dream of!  _ And _ if she played her cards right, the coastal city would be none the wiser about what was going on until it was too late and she was already gone. Yeah, there was no need to worry.

The thief threw a meat pie onto Old Girl’s nose. The brute eagerly threw her head back and snapped it up, then continued trotting down the mountainside. Rilla smiled, then gave her steed two harmless, kicks on the sides of her neck. “Hup! Com’on Oldie, a little faster now.”

The wyvern snorted, then broke into a sprint, her claws digging into the earth and rock as she ran down the mountain. A cool breeze blew hair across Rilla’s face while the rising sun warmed up her cheeks and neck.

Everything was gonna be just fine.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked that! I know it was kinda long. :3


End file.
